Public school children living in poverty across US in highest numbers since 1960s

A new study by the Southern Education Foundation has revealed that the number of low income students enrolled in schools across the United States has surged in recent years to new astronomical numbers.

According to the study, 17 of the 50 states in the country can
say that at least half of their students come from households
with incomes at or below the poverty line.

The results of the foundation’s research suggest schoolchildren
in large parts of the US are coming from less-fortunate
backgrounds at numbers not seen in decades. The last time a
majority of children in public schools in the South and West
placed under or at the poverty line, pollsters determined,
occurred in the 1960s.

In Mississippi, 71 percent of public schoolchildren placed into
the low income category. New Mexico and Louisiana rounded out the
top-three states with regards to low income majorities, and the
17 locales listed with as having more than half of their students
included states such as Florida and California, with 56 and 54
percent of its public school students, respectively, considered
low income.

Taking into account the whole US, the foundation said 48 percent
of all public school children came from homes with incomes low
enough to earn those students free or reduced lunches. They
based their data on statistics pertaining to the number of
children in grade preschool through 12 who were eligible for the
federal meals program in the 2010-11 school year.

“The rate of low income students in the South was 53
percent,” the study’s authors wrote, and “for the first
time in recent history, at least half of the public school
students in the West were low income.”

The foundation predicts that within the next few years, “low
income students will become a majority of all public school
children in the United States.”

“With huge stubborn unchanging gaps in learning, schools in
the south and across the nation face the real danger of becoming
entrenched, inadequately funded educational systems that enlarge
the division in America between the haves and the have-nots and
endanger the entire nation’s prospects,” Southern Education
Foundation Vice President Steve Suitts wrote in the report.

Sadly, Suitts doesn’t see much changing, either. “There is no
real evidence that any scheme or policy of transferring large
numbers of low income students from public schools to private
schools will have a positive impact on this problem,” he
wrote. “The trends of the last decade strongly suggest that
little or nothing will change for the better if schools and
communities continue to postpone addressing the primary question
of education in America today: what does it take and what will be
done to provide low income students with a good chance to succeed
in public schools? It is a question of how, not where, to improve
the education of a new majority of students.”

“Without fundamental improvements in how the South and the
nation educate low income students, the trends that this report
documents will ricochet across all aspects of American society
for generations to come,” he wrote.

Michael Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for
Educational Equity at Columbia University, described the findings
to the Washington Post as “incredible.”

"When you break down the various test scores, you find the
high-income kids, high-achievers are holding their own and
more," Rebell said. "It's when you start getting down to
schools with a majority of low-income kids that you get
astoundingly low scores. Our real problem regarding educational
outcomes is not the US overall, it's the growing low-income
population."

The US Census Bureau determined that 46.5 million people lived in
poverty across America in 2012, or around 15 percent of the
population. The same statistics determined that roughly 21
percent of school children in the US were impoverished as of last
year.